Tag Archives: Jerry Chesnutt

When people talk about classic country songwriters, they often speak of Harlan Howard, Cindy Walker, Jerry Chesnutt and Dallas Frazier.

But Gordon Lightfoot — best known in America for FM radio hits such as “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and best known in his native Canada as the nation’s “folk laureate” — has numerous, three-minute claims to classic-country-songwriter status.

“The first time someone from Nashville cut a song of mine was Marty Robbins, with ‘Ribbon of Darkness,’” said Lightfoot, 71. “He sped it up and did a wonderful job, and I still use his arrangement to this day. After Marty, I got to meet quite a few Nashville guys, and I made a couple of albums down there. George Hamilton IV had one of the best cuts, on ‘Early Morning Rain.’ I came down and did Johnny Cash’s television show, and got to meet Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury and Waylon Jennings and a lot of others.”

Lightfoot was a driven, voracious writer who put out 13 albums in his career’s first 10 years, between 1966 and 1976. In the new century, he has been slowed by a near-fatal abdominal hemorrhage, though not by the recent Internet rumors of his death. Greatly exaggerated, those.Continue reading →